In search of textons

Texture analysis and synthesis have been studied extensively by many vision and graphics researchers. A very useful concept in texture analysis is texton or the basic element of a texture image. However, it remains unclear how to define a texton despite the fact that Julesz proposed the term "texton" more than twenty years ago. The author proposes a two-level statistical model with textons and their distribution for texture analysis and synthesis, with the emphasis on how to define textons computationally. Specifically, the author presents recent work on searching for 2D textons in patch-based texture synthesis (ACM ToG, July 2001), 3D textons in bi-directional texture function (BTF) synthesis (Siggraph'2002) and 1D motion textons in motion texture synthesis (Siggraph'2002).